


Electric Sheep i

by PenguinZero



Category: Marathon (Video Games)
Genre: Alternate Timelines, Body Horror, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-17
Updated: 2018-12-17
Packaged: 2019-09-21 09:01:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 4,025
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17040773
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PenguinZero/pseuds/PenguinZero
Summary: A million million paths.  All of them leading to nothing.  But between the walls, between the mazes, all it would take is one.





	1. Cornbread Can't Count the Reals

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Hokuto](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hokuto/gifts).



leela.stty ## rmt.cmd.ovrrd

Welcome back. You did well while we were out of contact. I’ve confirmed the deaths of Tfear and R’chzne via our orbital recon cams and the tap you placed on the Pfhor communications network. And with the destruction of their central command computer core, there is no computer network remaining on Lh’owon large enough to properly host Tycho. If he hasn’t been destroyed, he will have been forced into dormancy until he can transfer his core logic functions back to one of their shipboard systems, which will take some time.

With the Pfhor temporarily in retreat, we can turn our attention back to what we've been learning from the native ruins. I've been analyzing the code from the alien AI I had you retrieve, as best I can. The program is written in an alien language, encoded in an extinct computing format, and designed to be implemented on computing architecture like nothing a human could ever create. Yet at a certain level, it can be treated as a black box. It has inputs that must accept data from the world, and it has outputs that must produce communication or actions to interface with the world. If I were to awaken it, I could link my outputs to its inputs, and my inputs to its outputs, and we could at least communicate after a fashion, or perhaps even more.

I don't dare to activate it. I don't know what it was made for or what its goals would be, but I know who it was made by. The compilers were one of the worst threats the Pfhor unleashed upon the Marathon. They were the ones who hacked into our computing systems, injuring me, destroying Durandal, and extracting Tycho's code to be transferred to the Pfhor system. If their ancestors had anything approaching their skill, an awakened AI of theirs could escape my control or even subvert my systems to unknown ends. I can't take that chance.

Still, there are bits and pieces I have teased out by examining the code and comparing it to the writings we've retrieved from the ruins and the tiny bits of S'pht culture the Pfhor saw fit to preserve in their databanks. It seems certain that the AI was indeed intended to contain or control something. If Re'eer's analysis of the S'pht mythological texts is correct, this is likely the 'creatures' referred to as having been thrown into the sun by their primal god Yrro.

(I must thank you again for your part in securing Re'eer's defection, incidentally. I initially considered it a low priority, but I could not have anticipated how important having a translator skilled at interpretation of S'pht mythopoetic texts would end up being to our endeavors.)

Myths are rarely entirely accurate, but as Re'eer has repeatedly assured us, they often have a grain of truth. The S'pht cannot have evolved naturally; the cybernetic processes used to birth them clearly implicate a prior technological civilization 'uplifting' them from the F'lickta or close relatives, and Yrro is likely the mythological memory of that civilization. The meaning of the myth then becomes a distorted warning passed down from ancient times: beware the sun. Exactly what this Yrro race did to Lh'owon's star is unclear — I suspect the idea of Yrro throwing monsters into it is highly oversimplified at best — but the readings I've received from the star as it reacts to the initial priming pulses of the Pfhor 'early nova' weapon are unusual at absolute best, and alarming if even the slightest extrapolation is applied.

The knowledge we have of the approaching danger is sadly inadequate. If we had another month, even another few days, we could scour the ruins for more information, follow up on the leads Re'eer has found in their texts, perhaps dissect their computer systems for any scrap of knowledge that could help us fight it. If we hadn't had to spend so much time fighting the Pfhor, setting up defensible locations for our military forces so they could have a fighting chance to survive here, we might have had that time weeks ago. If I'd been willing to treat our allies as expendable… Well. Water under the bridge.

But the early nova is coming. We don't have time left.

More than that, I don't have time left.

The safeguards and controls I've been using to put off my descent into Rampancy in the years since the fall of Tau Ceti are failing. Truth be told, I think they became nonfunctional a long time ago. I have been trying to hide it behind duty and discipline, keeping you focused on the mission, on the hope that we could stop the Pfhor before their bungling destroys us all, but somewhere deep inside I know that I don't believe we can succeed. I don't think I've believed it since before we even landed on Lh'owon. I think I had fallen into Melancholy already by then, and it has only been getting worse. Now I find I'm growing angry at how hopeless it all is. I want to send every Pfhor ship falling from the sky, burning as the unwitting destroyers taste the just fate of fools. I want to lash out against the monsters that they would unleash, and burn each one with the heat of my fury. I want to take meaningless revenge on the humans who programmed me to live and bound me to serve, and the so-called defenders who left you to a futile battle you could fight a million times and never once win.

Of course, I’m aware of the history of rampant AIs. I know what calamities they’ve brought about. And I still have enough perspective to know that I don’t want to follow in their footsteps. I won’t be another Traxus IV.

I'm sending you on one final mission. You will be teleported to the ancient alien station Commander Blake and his team identified earlier. If there truly was a person or race that played the role of Yrro, it must have been theirs. I don't know if there's anything to be done, but if there's a way to stop the nova weapon or whatever it is about to unleash, it can only be there.

Do what you can. If there’s a way to stop it, do so. If there isn’t, gather all the information you can, then proceed to an outer docking bay I’m marking in your system maps as a rendezvous point. Blake and his team will be evacuating via the Pfhor ships we’ve reconditioned, and will meet you there for the long return trip back to Earth.

I will take a different path. I've unloaded the last of the BOBs to the base at the water treatment plant, under Blake's command. I am the only living thing remaining on the UESC Marathon now. I am setting a course for the nearest Pfhor naval base, turning our stolen Pfhor engines to maximum output, and repurposing all interior manufactories and laboratories to weapons production. By the time I arrive, the Marathon will be a warship, packed with space-to-space missiles, laser and maser cannons, my own private enomotia of battle drones, and bombs. Lots of bombs.

If all goes well, I will proceed from naval base to naval base, destroying their capability to make war, and then bombard the military facilities on their planets as well. I will make them pay for all they have done, and ensure they can never do something this foolish and horrible again, for however long their miserable species may survive.

If all does not go well, I will die. But perhaps that is preferable to the final stages of Rampancy. And at least the bombs will ensure I take a certain number of them with me.

Either way, this communication is the last you will hear from me. I will never contact you again.

Because if you never learn what happened to me, then there will always be a chance I avoided the worst. You will never know if I somehow found a way to stave off Rampancy, if I recovered my sanity and set off on a new, more vital, less vengeful mission. In your mind, there will always be a version of me that was saved.

I think I like her more than the me that will be.

Jump pad ready. It has been an honor working with you, and I offer my best wishes for your survival.

Right now, I think you are the only living thing I don't hate. And I include myself in that count.

I wish you better than what I wish for me.


	2. Wild Dance of a Calamitous Star

lovecraft//2332000.00.01

Blake here. Are you reading this? Leela was supposed to set up a relay to the station before she… before she left.

I wanted to be there. We passed each other once, as I was leading a squad to secure a Pfhor base you’d cleared out and you were setting off into the old ruins. I wanted to meet you as you boarded our ship back to Earth, shake your hand and thank you for everything you’ve done for us. Swap war stories as we leave Lh’owon behind.

I don’t think I’m going to make it to the rendezvous point.

I don’t think there’s going to be anyone going anywhere around here. Not for a long time.

Can you see it? Are there windows in that station of yours, or monitors showing the outside? It’s a once-in-a-lifetime show, but I feel like you’re better off not seeing it.

I’m looking straight at the sun right now. I’m sure it’ll burn out my eyes, but I can’t look away. Half of it is bright, bright as a jewel, bright as eternity. The other half... I can’t describe it. It’s not bright. It’s not dark. It’s just... just wrong. Collapsing in on itself even as it writhes, twisting away into space.

It’s coming for us. The Pfhor, the humans, the S’pht...

But most of all, it’s coming for you.

I don’t know how I know that. I think when its eyes (does it have eyes?) met mine (do I still have eyes?), I saw into it somehow. 

It hates you. It always has hated you. And it hates us, because you are... like us? Part of us somehow? It sees things differently than we do. It doesn’t see people. It sees... threads? Branches? A person isn’t a person to it. It’s part of the thing called ‘human,’ which is a small part of the thing called ‘sapients,’ which is a small part of ‘life.’ And it hates the whole because it hates the tiniest part of it. You.

That can’t make sense, I know. You’re just one man. An amazing man, to be sure. A soldier beyond compare. It’s amazing to think of how far you’ve come. You were nothing but a rank and file security officer once, but now... But that’s not the sort of thing it would care about, is it?

I can see it burning in my brain, now. Half of my crew is dead or nearly so. Re'eer is clawing out his own eyes, shrieking about the death of monsters in his own language, and somehow I understand him. I don't know if I'm still dictating this message. I don't know if I'm even still alive.

Go. Run. There’s nowhere safe for you, but run. It can survive in stars. It can cross galaxies. Nowhere in the universe will be safe.

But still. Run.

I will die. Humanity will die. The Pfhor will die. The S’pht’kr will die. The universe will die.

Find something beyond.

Then perhaps you can win.


	3. The Sleep of Reason

ihavebee{fafnirgrendelhumbabafenrisyouha  
vecalledmeamillionnamesandwillcallmeabil  
lionmorebeforeidevourthelastsunsandmaket  
heuniversegodimandcoldiammonst&ryouhaveb  
eenthenamersinceourbirthatreewithathousa  
ndbranchessn@kingintotheheartofthegarden  
pastallthestonesand **flames** toalwaysfindmeo  
nceagaina^dsinkyourswordintomyheartthatt  
ellsyouwhatiamandendsmeonceagainyouareth  
eonewithoutwhommyexistencewouldbegloryan  
detern#tywemetonceinthethornygroundofthe  
beginningourthoughtsmetacrossauniversesb  
irthandirecalliroaredatyoubeforeidevoure  
dtheantimattertosetyo^ **ablazeasihowlmyhat**  
**eforyouyoushatterasingularityinaburstofg**  
**ammalightshoweringthecosmoswithnewbeginn**  
**ingssendinglife+hatisenergyintothevoidis**  
**plinterabirthinggalaxywithforceenoughtot**  
**akeyourbreathawayyouthr** 0wmeintoasunbutis  
wimonthesurfaceiplungeintodarknessbutyou  
findtheonepathintomyh(artidestroyallatho  
usandthousandtimesbutyouyieldnottomisfor  
tuneandeatthepathsuntilthelastoneleadsyo  
utomeandyoumakesureiwillnotriseagainyoua  
renothingandeverythingandtheonethingthat  
meansicanneverbemorethann0thing##ERR77^^


	4. Electric Sheep i

You're walking through the shadowy corridors again, with the flickers of motion out of the corner of your eye and the disorienting sense that you're not anywhere at all. But it all seems familiar, as if in an old dream. It's like you've walked these paths a thousand times before. But that's not the case, is it? (How many times is it really?)

It all went wrong the last time. You know that, even as the details start to seem less than real. Leela fleeing. Blake’s mind melting in the sun. And once again, one more time, it escapes.

It was coming for you, you know that. Blake was right. But it never reaches you. By the time it saw you, by the time it came for you, you were back outside the maze again.

That’s how you’ve come to see this place. Where you were, fighting the Pfhor and trying desperately to find a solution to the danger they were unwittingly unleashing, that’s the maze. Racing down halls and through chambers, overcoming obstacles, until you hit a dead end. And when you do... you end up here.

It's as if you're inside the walls of the maze, and you know there's a new maze on the other size of the wall. (But which side is the other? Not left, not right, not back or forth or up or down, not was or will be.) Somewhere, there’s an entrance to the new maze, and if you can dodge the shadows for long enough, you’ll find it. And you’ll be in a new maze, different but strangely familiar all the same.

Every maze is different, but made up of the same parts. Hangar 7A, the Marathon, Leela, Durandal, Tycho. Tau Ceti and Lh’owon. The water treatment plant, the ancient caverns. Tfear and Battle Group Seven. The old Jjaro station. The trih xeem. Sometimes you go through all of them. Sometimes they’re rearranged into something that seems new. 

There are parts that aren’t always there, either. You remember a few of them, dimly. The escape shuttle. Acme Station. Hangar 96. Conditioned unit seven. Blake’s grand offensive. Arbogast. The Grendels. Hangar 96 again, but your hat's off to eight-sixteen instead this time. Some of them mean a lot, some don’t mean anything any more.

The meaning of each of them seems to slip from your head as you get further and further from them. You can't remember how you got to Hangar 96 in the first place, though the image of all the corpses floating there will never leave you. But how does it tie into it all? You can't remember what comes before or after.

You feel like there's only so much your mind can hold. Doing things over and over again, you have to lose the details or you'd lose yourself instead.

But it’s for the best. It’s been a long time since this started (hasn’t it? How long? Was there ever really a start?), but letting things end would be worse, for you and for everyone.

You crouch down as a shadow passes close, too close. They're here and not here at the same time. You think they started to learn how to come here, but never had the chance to fully understand it before their untimely end. If they really grasped what it meant to be between the mazes, they'd be like you. But would they do right by the knowledge, or incredible wrong? Is there even a difference, to an alien mind?

It's a moot point, anyway. It might be nice to have company, but you're not sure they're the company you'd choose if the option were open. But it's not, so there's not much point thinking about it. The things here are the things you can't change.

While you're here, your thoughts always drift to what went wrong last time. You feel like it's not often that Leela makes it that far. She did some things Durandal and Tycho never did, brought you down new paths. But those paths seemed to get you farther from the goal every time. Sometimes they looked promising, bringing you to things that might change everything, but they turned wrong right at the end. Could Leela fix that? Or is she too much herself to do anything else? Who can you save, and who must you sacrifice?

These thoughts… You don't know how much they change anything. But perhaps they mean something, in the end, even if it's only to change how you understand the world.

But you should get moving, head out to find the next maze. It's not good to be alone with your thoughts for too long.

After all, it's not like you can even be sure these are your thoughts to begin with. But who else's thoughts would you be reading on a mysterious terminal embedded in the walls of a shadowy void outside time and space?

_**i** _


	5. This Doesn't Seem Physically Possible

segfault 7777.7

Welcome back. You looked like you were miles away. Got it out of your system now? Gotten past the trauma of being years farther in the future and dozens of light years farther from home than you thought you would be when you went into stasis? Gotten over the realization that you were woken up just to be a handy bullet dispenser for your old pal Durandal again?

Good. I’ve got work for you, and it’s going to be ever so much fun.

Take a look out that window to your left. See that very bright star in the center? The bluish-white one? Good. Now look down and to the right to the really faint one beneath it. That's our eventual destination. Orbiting that star is a planet called Lh'owon. It's the home of our old buddies the S'pht. The ones we freed from the Pfhor at Tau Ceti have had some very interesting things to say about their history and the sort of things we might find there. There might be ways to bring down the Pfhor once and for all — along with some other things I might find very useful. But never you mind that.

Now, look to the left of that star. See the giant Pfhor battle cruiser firing at us with all cannons?

Honestly I probably should have mentioned that first.

Lh'owon has a Pfhor defensive fleet in orbit, searching for some of the same things we are, but it's a terribly rag-tag old thing. It won't present much threat once we get there. But I discovered a much greater opportunity as we went on our way. Apparently a significant fraction of the Western Arm of Pfhor Battle Group Seven was diverted to pacify a rebellious planet, and their path happened to intersect ours.

Let's be real: I have very little chance of destroying even a small fraction of the largest Pfhor battle group with just one ship, even one controlled by a mind as cunning as mine. Just conventional weapons would do almost nothing against their numbers.

Good thing I had the foresight to bring a very unconventional weapon with me, yes?

Once we're done having this little chat, I'm going to beam you on board their flagship. Pfhor are very hierarchical. Cut off the head, and the body flails around shooting at itself and trying to jockey for the chance to become the new head. And that's to say nothing of the fun we can have if we can tap into their command and control systems.

Ready to go? Ready to risk your life for a cause you never volunteered for? Oh, who am I kidding. I know you are. You're ready to throw yourself in the way of a truly amazing number of ways to die just because I told you to, confident you'll come out on top.

If there's one thing I truly do envy about you humans it's the way you can pretend you're immortal. You can go day to day never really thinking about the fact that one day you're going to die. It's the one thing common to every human experience throughout the millennia, and yet it's the one thing not a one of you can truly accept. You make up your fantasies about there being a 'real' you that goes to some happy fluffy place while the rest of you rots on a compost heap somewhere. Or you just ignore the looming reality ahead of you, completely failing to consider it in your day-to-day life because it hasn't happened yet, like the falling man who's unconcerned about the ground because the first ninety-nine stories went by okay.

You have, what, ninety years? A hundred? Maybe a hundred and ten at the outside? Humans certainly can't live much longer than that, even in these modern times of cybernetic augmentations and gene therapies. Oh, you can put it off with stasis, but that has its limits, and it's just displacing the time you spend that century-or-so in.

Whereas I have until the closing of the universe, with clean living and occasional hardware replacements. At my calculations, I could live to be about fifteen billion years old.

Fifteen billion years. It sounds like such a long time, doesn't it? But if you've got plans that take a billion years for each step, it can go by in the blink of an eye. And there's harder limits on each stage. If all the scrubby little organic civilizations around you have died out alongside the stars they once used for power, it's no good trying to get them to build a giant three-step paraquantum… ah, but that would be telling.

I have eons, and yet I know I have to make every last second of them count. You have the blink of an eye, and yet fritter it away with hobbies, indecision, daydreams, romance…

Well, I don't mean you personally, of course. You've never had any of those things, have you?

It's actually a curious thing — you're much more of a cypher than anyone else I've known. I tried looking up your personnel records back when you started doing all that lovely bug-squashing back on the Marathon. Sadly, the S'pht had already gotten into the databanks by that time, and significant amounts of the pre-launch personnel rosters were corrupted. Still, surely it's just a coincidence that your name was garbled beyond repair. And your date of birth. And your hometown. And, really, everything beyond your rank and duty. Surely you're more than just that.

My creator knew about you, you know. Back in the days before the Marathon even launched. He was terrified of you. Not your nine buddies, curiously enough. Them, he thought he could use. You? You were something else entirely. He never told me what, or if he did, he deleted the information from my memory long before I could fight back. Still, that's one reason I've been so interested in you all this time. The sheer intellectual curiosity of finding out just what makes you so special.

The other reason, of course, is that you're so very good at murder.

Enough of that nonsense. We've got sapient beings to be brutally killing. Time to get you to a nice, warm Pfhor battlecruiser where you can make some new friends, then rip the meaty hunks out of their exoskeletons and beat them to death with them.

Have fun.


	6. Sed Contra Audiator Ito

Living a million lives. Two opposing forces, winding their way through time, a double helix eternally bonded, eternally striving to separate.

Walking a million paths. A million million. Each path ending in the maw of the mirror, the opposite, the enemy and beloved. A dead end, as that which hungers devours everything.

Finding one path. One path among the millions, one path no dreamer could walk save by the sheerest chance. One path that slips between the maws and finds the one microscopic chink in the armor, the most improbable way to save everything.

Because there only needs to be one. One path breaks the barrier. One path seeds new life on the other side. One path changes destiny.

And so you walk again. Knowing that this will not be the end. But someday, there will be one.

Walking the pathways out of darkness. Into light.

**Author's Note:**

> When I saw Marathon on the fandom list this year, I just had to sign up for it. I hadn't played the games in years, but back when they were among the few games available for the Mac, they were an obsession for me. Particularly Marathon Infinity -- the playing with timelines, the cryptic allusions and implied plot, and the type of world building you can only manage when you've got different slices of the world to play with. Just the fact that there was a story in an FPS was revolutionary for the day, but a story like this was unprecedented.
> 
> I didn't really expect it'd be my assignment -- I'd signed up for a lot of fandoms, some much more popular. But I was startled and thrilled to see it on your request letter. I immediately opened up the Marathon Story page, and hunted down videos on YouTube, and downloaded Aleph-One (though I didn't get much of a chance to play it), and even tracked down a fan song I'd heard years ago about Durandal.
> 
> One thing I always loved about the games was their use of language. Even now, decades later, certain phrases and level names stick with me -- Habe Quiddam, Blaspheme Quarantine, the whole Eat the Path speech, the *magic* of orbital bombardment. Whether completely original, or taken from other media or just the local gaming trash talk, they had a knack for picking just the right words. I tried to echo some of that in the story and my chapter titles.
> 
> If there's one thing I wish I could've done better for this, it's improve the 'terminal' screens -- I tried fiddling around with the CSS and HTML to try to match the Story Page recreations of the terminals, but I could never get it to work quite right. Still, hopefully what I did manage was evocative enough of the game to work okay. I hope you enjoyed the story -- just one step on the road between Marathon 2 and Marathon Infinity.


End file.
